​Date: 19th January 2024

Location: DUNE factory at Daresbury Laboratory

MicroBooNE is a major liquid-argon accelerator neutrino experiment located on the Booster neutrino beamline at Fermilab and the first liquid argon detector to demonstrate end-to-end particle physics analyses. The experiment is also a crucial contributor towards the detectors in development for DUNE (aka the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment). The University of Manchester is a major collaborator to the MicroBooNE experiment and host of the latest collaboration meeting.

The visitors were excited to see Daresbury Lab's DUNE factory, which is building the main readout elements (known as APAs or anode plane assemblies) for the first 10 kT module for the DUNE experiment, and how the detector is being constructed. The factory itself is a collaboration between Daresbury Lab and the universities of Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Lancaster, Cambridge, and Sussex. 

Many of the visitors were post-doctoral and PhD students who will eventually be leading the exploitation of the data produced by DUNE in the 2030s and 40s. The visit was a great opportunity to show off the work being completed at Daresbury, the leading non-US contribution to the DUNE project, and demonstrate the international impact of this work. 

Nationally, the factory and the work of DUNE's UK collaborators is creating jobs and generating major contracts for people and companies in the north of England. Internationally, the experiment will answer some of the most important physics questions, examining the nature of antimatter and our theories about the origin of the Universe. 

Prof. Justin Evans, Professor at the University of Manchester and MicroBooNE co-spokesperson, said: 

"Our MicroBooNE collaborators were hugely impressed by the scale of the Daresbury factory and learnt a lot by seeing the DUNE APAs from which they will one day be analysing data. The visit was a great highlight of our collaboration meeting."​